Great extensive list of old Sesame Street
Great extensive list of old Sesame Street videos that you can watch on YouTube. Oh, the nostalgia. (Rubber duckie!!!)
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Entries for May 2006
A list of the films preserved in
A list of the films preserved in the United States National Film Registry. (thx, robert)
The King James version of the Bible
The King James version of the Bible makes several mentions of unicorns, but it seems to be a creative mistranslation on the part of the KJB’s authors rather than evidence that the Bible is mythical. God still hates shrimp, though.
Brandon Flowers expresses his love for Bruce
Brandon Flowers expresses his love for Bruce Springsteen and then announces that The Killers are recording “one of the best albums in the past 20 years”. (via gf)
Richard Dawkins has a new book coming
Richard Dawkins has a new book coming out in October called The God Delusion. For some reason, I don’t see this being a big seller in the US.
How will David Blaine hold his breath
How will David Blaine hold his breath for 9 minutes? Relaxation and pure oxygen.
Alright Star Wars nerds, here’s the moment
Alright Star Wars nerds, here’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for…the original as-shown-in-the-theater versions of Star Wars, Empire, and Jedi are being released on DVD, at long last. Han shoots first!
Guidelines from the Secret Service on the
Guidelines from the Secret Service on the printed reproduction of currency. I once photocopied a dollar bill at the office on our uber-photocopier and was astounded how good it looked…I don’t envy the SS’s task here.
Pixel cities
Here’s part of a fun pixel illustration of Communication City by eboy:
Click through to see the whole image. eboy did the illustration for a Fortune magazine article on the resurgence of internet companies. The company also does amazingly intricate futuristic posters of cities. Oh, and this T-Mobile HotSpot map of London…I could go on and on.
The Broom of the System
Following a long tradition on this site, I’m going to make a prediction based on very little evidence: David Foster Wallace will never write another novel. My feeling after reading The Broom of the System is that it’s basically a rough draft of the novelized “version” of his “life” that eventually became the lovingly polished Infinite Jest. (That’s right, two is a trend!) Or if he does, it’ll be 20 years from now, when enough time has passed for him to reflect on his experiences in long-format fiction as a writer, husband, teacher, famous personage, and (if he ever has kids) father.
As for Broom itself, I haven’t read enough philosophy for a proper review. The best I can do is compare it to Infinite Jest. If you want to read IJ but just can’t handle its 1000+ pages and 300+ footnotes, read Broom first. If you hate it, no big deal…it’s only 480 pages. But if you like it, you can safely devour IJ.
Currently coveting: the Galaxie Polaris type family
Currently coveting: the Galaxie Polaris type family from Village type foundry. Beautiful.
Lengthy update on what Al Gore has
Lengthy update on what Al Gore has been up to since the 2000 Presidential Election, including his work on global warming, documented in An Inconvenient Truth (my review).
Wired magazine reports on the revolutionary food
Wired magazine reports on the revolutionary food and strange equipment (antigriddle!) used by chef Grant Achatz in the kitchen at Alinea. “The technology allows us to get to the essence of food. It allows you to be more true with flavor, not less true.”
New Yorker music critic Alex Ross has
New Yorker music critic Alex Ross has compiled a chronolocial 100-song playlist/tour of mostly classical/instrumental music for the 20th century. Starts with Stravinsky & Gershwin and ends with Bjork.
The Onion AV Club is not impressed
The Onion AV Club is not impressed with this year’s crop of blockbusters in their 2006 Summer Movie Preview.
OMGITWBI! (Oh my god, it’s the world’s
OMGITWBI! (Oh my god, it’s the world’s best invention!) Bed Books have sideways text for easy reading lying in bed. (via cyn-c)
The Bridge
Having lived in San Francisco, I’ve walked across the Golden Gate Bridge and driven across it countless times. The bridge is a nearly perfect metaphor for what some people go there to do. The view on a clear day into the city, the red painted cables glowing in the sun, the sudden way the fog comes in off the ocean to envelop the bridge, the path from the cold city to the warmth of Marin County. Death too is beautiful, dramatic, mysterious, abrupt, and an escape to another place.
In The Bridge, a film about the Golden Gate and suicide, director Eric Steel makes effective use of the bridge’s imagery and its relation to death; you can see why so many people choose to end their lives there. The footage he and his crew got is astounding at times…families discuss the death of a loved one while that same person is shown pacing back and forth on the bridge, thinking, waiting. You see a group of police officers, looking almost bored (which was probably hyper-aware nonchalance), talking a man back over the railing.
And yet, I can’t tell if that footage actually added anything to the discussion of the issues of mental illness, depression, and coping which were at the heart of many of the jumpers’ problems. Does watching death make it any more understandable to family members. To audience members? The footage doesn’t say why, it just shows us how, and those aren’t quite the same things.
Here’s an earlier post on The Bridge, a graph of suicides by location on the Bridge, and the New Yorker article by Tad Friend that inspired the film.
Interview with photographer Alec Soth. “I feel
Interview with photographer Alec Soth. “I feel like a large part of photography is like a performance. And the photograph is like a document of this performance, of this encounter with the world.” Many interviews with photographers often end up sounding very similar, but I enjoy reading them anyway. (via eyeteeth)
In March of 2004, an artist named Tofu
In March of 2004, an artist named Tofu began constructing a map comprised only of the hometowns of American men and women killed in Iraq (map detail). “One of the disturbing by products of this work are the maps of various states with many rectangular pieces missing where I cut out towns.” (via moon river)
Nabokov on Lewis Carroll and his photography: “
Nabokov on Lewis Carroll and his photography: “I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll, because he was the first Humbert Humbert. Have you seen those photographs of him with little girls?” Nabokov aside, there’s no real evidence that Carroll did anything untoward with any of his photographic subjects. View some of Carroll’s photos here, here, and here. (via tmn)
Make your own x-rays: buy a dental
Make your own x-rays: buy a dental x-ray machine on eBay and use it with Polaroid film. Mit photos.
Good new series of ads for Apple; “
Good new series of ads for Apple; “Get a Mac”. I’m pretty sure the chap playing the PC is John Hodgman (author, Daily Show correspondent, This American Life commentator, former literary agent, monthly readings holder, hobo expert). Can anyone confirm? (via df)
Update: According to MacRumors, the Mac is played by Justin Long.
Update #2: Yep, seems to be Hodgman.
Mexico photos
For our honeymoon, we stayed right on the ocean near Tulum in the Yucatan, about two hours south of Cancun by car. Most of these photos are taken near Tulum, at Chichen Itza, or in Valladolid.
James Surowiecki fills us in on a
James Surowiecki fills us in on a new investment opportunity, housing futures. “If housing futures work the way they’re supposed to, they will shift risk from those who are less able to bear it (individual homeowners with hefty mortgages) to those who are more willing to (speculators looking for a big upside on their investments). In the process, they will effectively provide a form of house-price insurance.”
What the hell? Magical stuntman David Blaine
What the hell? Magical stuntman David Blaine is spending a week in a spherical aquarium in Lincoln Center. Gothamist has photos and links to more info about the stunt.
Cell phone trees. “Unlike most palms and
Cell phone trees. “Unlike most palms and gymnosperms that take many decades to grow, these ‘new’ trees appear within days.” This is my favorite cell phone tree, just outside of NYC and completely inconspicuous.
Movie schedule for the 2006 Bryant Park Summer
Movie schedule for the 2006 Bryant Park Summer FIlm Festival. Bring a picnic and enjoy the likes of Bullitt, Rocky, and The Manchurian Candidate.
Update: Subscribe to the movie schedule in XML or iCal format. (thx, brian)
David Sedaris reminds us that giving gifts is never easy.
David Sedaris reminds us that giving gifts is never easy.
Controversy over The Bridge
One of the films premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival is The Bridge, a documentary by Eric Steel about suicide and the Golden Gate Bridge. The trailer is available on the festival site but be warned that it contains actual footage of people climbing over the railing of the bridge to commit suicide.
The Bridge was inspired by a 2003 New Yorker story by Tad Friend called Jumpers, a piece about suicide and the bridge. The subject of suicide is often not discussed in the media. Self-inflicted deaths aren’t usually reported in the newspapers or on TV. Suicide prevention activists caution against suicide contagion due to media exposure of individual suicides leading to copycat deaths.
But that’s just the start of the controversy surrounding the film. In order to secure a permit to shoot the Golden Gate (which he did for the entirety of 2004, amassing almost 10,000 hours of footage), Steel said he was shooting footage to capture “the powerful, spectacular intersection of monument and nature that takes place every day at the Golden Gate Bridge”. He says he lied to discourage people to seek out his cameras to immortalize their deaths on film, but it’s also true that Golden Gate National Recreation Area officials certainly wouldn’t have given him a permit to film suicides.
Steel interviewed family members of the jumpers without disclosing that he’d filmed the death of their loved ones (again to avoid publicity for the filming and the death immortalization problem). Some family members felt manipulated by the omission when they learned of it.
Then there’s the matter of the filming itself. The film crew’s basic job description was to wait for people to die…they needed people to die for their film. If there’s no good footage of people jumping, there’s no film. Without too much trouble, you can imagine Steel instructing his crew to shoot the next one at a wider angle, the crew refining their techniques for catching the jumpers on film, and the mixture of excitement, dread, and the satisfaction of a job well done when they catch a jumper on film. But the crew was also trained in suicide prevention and intervened in several attempts. And listening to Steel talk about the film, it obviously wasn’t meant to be Faces of Death Part XII.
Here are a few more articles on The Bridge:
- Film documenting Golden Gate Bridge suicides premieres, San Jose Mercury News
- Golden Gate star of dark documentary, San Francisco Chronicle
- Man Survives Suicide Jump From Golden Gate Bridge, ABC News
Keyword Cartoons chronicles the adventures of GGirl,
Keyword Cartoons chronicles the adventures of GGirl, a character whose daily activities correspond with high-paying keywords on Google AdSense, like laser hair removal and asbestos cancer.
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